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tried his hand at carpentry. The experiment had been a success. He liked everything about the work, from the smell of the wood chips to the rasp of the saw. The workshop had been flooded with light, the craftsmen calm, sturdy people, intent on their tasks, taciturn but good company. Only the press of other obligations had made Franz give it up.
    At the end of the workday he goes for the first time to Nusle, a lively suburb of Prague. He discovers, on stepping off the tram, a neighborhood of modest houses surrounded by open and unfenced vegetable gardens. There is a great deal going on around him. Children are playing in the streets, fighting over American swings, young girls are singing next to a merry-go-round, somewhere a brass band is playing, workingmen on their way home talk in clusters and drink beer, while others hoe their garden plots.
    The vegetable gardener is waiting for him in front of his land at the appointed place. He hands Franz a spade and shows him how to use it, to spread his legs slightlyand bend his knees, lean forward from the waist, keep the neck relaxed.
    “Use the spade as a lever, uproot the whole thing.”
    The man looks at his pupil’s white, slender hands and thinks that he’s an idle fellow, unlikely to stay the course.
    “Small motions, slower, you don’t want to hurt your back. Drive the spade with your foot.”
    Franz is wearing only a shirt and trousers. It is cold, and a fine April rain falls intermittently. He continues assailing and moving the heavy soil all the same. Soon he is sweating and developing blisters on his hands, but he feels a happy fatigue. “This dull, honest, useful, silent, solitary, healthy, strenuous work,” he writes Felice that evening, “is not without significance to someone who has led a desk-and-sofa life, allowing himself continually to be assailed and deeply moved.” On subsequent days the crunching sound of the earth stays in his ears.
    His body becomes heavier, straighter, his sense of his own dignity is reinforced. “I feel,” he writes to Max, “like a Fury that has been tamed.”
    H e breathes more easily because Felice has not replaced him. He was so frightened! On a business trip to Frankfurt, she attended a trade exhibition where she camein contact with a great many people and answered none of his letters. Franz imagined that she had met a vigorous, well-dressed, healthy, and amusing young man who took his place. He went through the hell of being abandoned. He panicked, ran to his good friend Max: “Please write to Felice, I absolutely must know.”
    The fear of losing her was strangling him. The next day he received a few words from her. Life returned.
    “Love me a little, Felice. Do you feel how much I love you? Do you feel it?” he writes, forgetting the thousand warnings he has given her.
    Subsequently, he asks for, he insists on, a second meeting in Berlin at Whitsun, in mid-May.
    “I must, must, see you, Felice.”
    He agrees to everything. Meet her parents? At home? Attend the reception they are giving for the engagement of her brother, Ferry? Good idea. Everything seems like a good idea.
    He is already concerned about the clothes he will wear on his visit: a black suit? He would feel more comfortable in his normal summer suit.
    “Should I bring flowers for your mother? And what kind of flowers?”
    A stream of questions. He returns to the subject so often after Felice no longer wants to discuss it, directs herso insistently to think more deeply about it, that Felice starts writing less often. In her short, laconic letters, he sees only the words “in haste” and “again in haste.”
    “My eyes hurt at the very sight of these words.”
    “You’re the one hurting me, I am sad and tired,” she answers.
    Sad and tired. How could she not be? Franz’s indecision, his contradictions, his tyranny, his demands, his complaints have worn her down.
    By introducing him to her family, the young woman is leading him toward marriage, and